by Joe McNally
4
Mave had been calling Sonny every half hour to try and arrange the pick-up. At nine o’clock, worried, she rang Eddie.
‘Mave. He’s probably gone to a bar to spend some of his commission.’
‘He rarely drinks. And he never ignores my voicemails or texts. The reason he chose that place in Salisbury was because of the signal strength. The phone just rings out.’
‘Give him another hour or so.’
‘Will you wait up?’
‘Of course.’
By midnight, she’d had no response. The longer she waited for word, the more upset she got. Eddie watched her strained face on the screen, and said, ‘Want me to drive down and check the caravan?’
‘Would you? I’m just scared he’s had a hypo and he’s lying somewhere.’
Eddie was confident Sonny wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. Type one diabetes was as much a part of Sonny as his limbs were. He’d managed the illness perfectly all his life and never took chances. But Eddie sensed Mave was beyond logical debate. She just wanted the reassurance. And one thing wasn’t sitting right with Eddie…the fact that Sonny had hugged him before parting that evening. He’d never done that before.
Eddie told Mave he would call when he reached Sonny’s place. ‘It’ll take me an hour.’
‘Okay. I’ll be here.’
Sonny’s southern base was a thirty-five foot static caravan on a pleasant site on the outskirts of Salisbury. The gates were closed. Eddie pressed the buzzer for security and explained about Sonny’s illness.
His caravan was in darkness. His big black motorcycle was nowhere to be seen. Eddie persuaded the security guard to get the master key to the caravan. Sonny wasn’t there. Nothing had been disturbed. Eddie called Mave and she asked if he had any idea what route home Sonny would have taken from the graveyard.
‘No way of knowing, Mave.’ He considered mentioning that Sonny had seemed a bit more heavy-hearted than usual, but it was pointless worrying her further. Anyway, that was just Sonny. He’d been singing. Maybe Eddie had simply read things wrong, given the surroundings. It was all about the ambience, as Sonny had said.
‘Do you think anyone could have followed him from the track?’ Mave asked.
‘He’s been very careful. So have I.’
‘I know, I’m just-’
‘If anyone had followed him to mug him, they’d have done it before he handed the cash over, wouldn’t they? Not much point in it afterward.’
‘Unless they didn’t see him give it to you?’
‘True.’
‘Should I call the police?’
‘I don’t think you should, Mave. He’s a well-adjusted adult who doesn’t take alcohol or drugs and he’s been "missing" for about seven hours. They’d tell you to ring back in a week.’
‘It’s just not him, Eddie. You know that!’
‘I know. But it’s three in the morning. You’ve done what you can. Let’s see what daylight brings. If he hasn’t turned up by the time I leave Stratford tomorrow, I’ll drive straight to your place.’
She sighed. ‘Okay. If I hear from him in the next few hours, should I call you?’
‘Please. I’ll leave my phone on.’
5
The usual stream of banter criss-crossed the Stratford changing room. Underlying the chatter was an edginess about three jockeys who’d been suspended by the BHA that morning pending possible prosecution on charges of race-fixing.
Racing wasn’t clean. It wasn’t straight. But Eddie and his fellow riders knew the villains. They lived a close life in those changing rooms up and down the country, and a jockey is first to realize when others in a race aren’t trying to win. But Eddie believed the sport was ninety-five percent straight, and there was nothing he could do about the other five percent except avoid associating with them.
Riley Duggan, head popping through black and yellow silks, fixed his hair and said, ‘Shock move by the BHA, Eddie, eh?’
‘Yep. Not like them to exceed the speed of a tortoise.’
‘You hoping those three get warned off?’ Riley asked.
A dangerous question. Eddie was one of just ninety-five professional jump jockeys in the UK. More amateur jockeys than pros held riding licences. And there were a hundred or so young conditional jockeys, jumping’s equivalent of apprentices. They all lived and worked in a cramped, competitive, dangerous world. A careless remark about someone would soon reach that person. Riley wasn’t trying to lead Eddie into any kind of verbal trap; he was a straightforward guy who just said what he was thinking. Eddie pulled his boots on. ‘I’ve got enough to worry about with my own career to give theirs any thought, Riley.’
Three hours later, winnerless, but fresh and showered, Eddie walked through the car park, bordered by meadows. The sounds and smells of harvesting immersed him. It was one of those rare summer evenings with no haze or humidity. Eddie got his phone from the glove box and called Mave. ‘Any news on Sonny?’
‘Nothing. I’ve spent most of the day calling hospitals.’
He wanted to reassure her, but encouraging words would offer no comfort. ‘I’ll be there in a couple of hours, Mave.’
‘You staying?’
‘For as long as it takes.’
‘See you soon.’
The day’s warmth lasted, and when Mave’s white house came into Eddie’s view, the bottom half of it rippled in a heat haze. The sea beyond was flat calm. A perfect setting, except for a missing friend.
Mave heard Eddie drive into the yard behind the house, and came to meet him. She put her arms around his neck. He hugged her just tightly enough to hold her comfortably for as long as she needed the support.
They stood linked and silent for over a minute. The only sounds came from sea birds. He could sense her distress and that oddly consoling feeling of being attached to her, of fitting together naturally, of silent communication. She felt it too. Eddie knew that. ‘Do you want to walk?’ he asked.
‘Let’s have some coffee first. You’ve had a long drive.’
‘Fill a flask. Bring a blanket. We’ll sit on the headland.’
When Eddie first met Maven Judge, she’d told him she lived in a cliff shack. That’s what he’d expected to see on his first visit that spring as he drove the final narrow road on the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales.
Mave’s "shack" turned out to be an old whitewashed farmhouse, its walls two-feet thick to thwart the weather when it blasted up the sheer cliff over Hell’s Mouth bay.
They wandered into the evening sunshine, Eddie carrying a big old rug rolled up on his shoulder. Mave walked alongside swinging a plastic bag in which mugs and spoons and flask rattled in the remarkable stillness. ‘Heaviest blanket I’ve ever seen, this,’ Eddie said. She smiled sadly, glad at his attempt to make her feel better. But her head was down, watching her boots trail through the grass.
They settled twenty yards from the cliff edge. Birds rose, then dropped from sight as though bouncing from below the cliffs. Eddie poured coffee. Maven watched the horizon. Eddie pointed to what looked like mountains away across the Irish Sea. ‘Is that a mirage, or am I seeing things?’
She smiled again. ‘You’re doing your best, Eddie. That’s the Wicklow Mountains. A rare sight. There’s usually a haze or sea weather.’
‘It’s been a diamond of a day.’
She nodded.
‘Weather-wise, I mean.’
‘I know.’ She drank and turned to him. ‘What do we do next?’
He shrugged. ‘Wait, I suppose.’
‘Somebody’s got Sonny, haven’t they?’
‘Maybe. How many winning bets has he placed on track since you started?’
‘Thirty-two’
‘Losers?’
‘Two.’
‘Between what he delivered to me and dropped off here, how much has he carried?’
‘More than four million.’
Eddie pulled a long strand of grass and twisted it and stared at the grou
nd.
‘I don’t like it when you go silent on me,’ Mave said. ‘Do you think you were followed from the track yesterday?’
‘Possibly, but what would be the point of following me? You’ve never bet in any race I’ve ridden in. Sonny’s the one who’s been moving among the bookies collecting the cash.’
‘That’s what I can’t work out…why they let Sonny get to you with the money.’
‘Maybe they were waiting for him at the caravan. Maybe they expected him to have the money.’
‘But he didn’t, so what’s the point of holding him? They’re onto this, aren’t they? The betting,’ she said.
‘They could be.’
‘I’ve been stupid, and complacent, and careless, and Sonny’s taking the consequences,’ she said.
‘Mave, it was never going to be risk-free. Sonny knew that. It was one of the reasons he liked doing it. If somebody’s got him, they’ll be making a call to us soon.’
‘There won’t be any call. Sonny won’t talk.’
‘He won’t need to. If they’ve been tracking us for a while, they’ll know I’m getting the cash.’
‘But that’s why it makes no sense. They didn’t stop Sonny before he handed it over to you.’
‘They’ll have bigger plans than a one-off mugging.’
‘If I’ve heard nothing by midnight, I’m calling the police.’
‘Okay.’
She turned. ‘You’re humouring me.’
He nodded.
She said, ‘The money doesn’t matter anymore. The system doesn’t matter. I can do something else.’
‘I know you can. And I know the money doesn’t matter. But all the police will be able to do is the same as us…wait for the call. And the call’s going to say don’t involve the cops.’
She looked away again. Eddie said, ‘This is probably a couple of fly boys who think I’m easy meat. Give them a chance to show their hand.’
‘You got a signal?’
He checked his phone. ‘One bar.’
She stood up. ‘We’d best get back then. You get four at the house, don’t you?’
Eddie looked at her as he squinted against the sinking sun. ‘Mave, why are you dusting off your jeans? You’ve been sitting on an inch-thick rug.’
‘Habit, I suppose. Come on.’ She gathered the coffee things. Eddie crawled to the edge of the rug and pulled up the corner to look at the underside.
‘Eddie…what are you doing?’
‘Looking for the start button. I thought we’d fly back, on our magic carpet.’ She took three quick steps toward him and raised her boot to his shoulder, pushing him over to roll in the grass. ‘Move your arse, Malloy.’
He lay looking up at her. ‘You know you could have injured me? Me, your rug carrier. Your slave.’
‘Get up, or I’ll roll you off the edge of the cliff.’
‘You and whose army?’
She ran at him. He jumped up and she chased him round the rug. A couple walking a dog stopped and watched Eddie and Maven running in circles against the setting sun.
6
As night came on, Peter McCarthy moved from the garden chair into his house. Since his wife Jean had died last winter, his dread at coming home to an empty house had grown. Unable to face it on the day he’d lost his job, Mac had checked into a London hotel and drank himself to sleep.
He couldn’t stay away for ever, but he could spend as much time in the garden as the weather allowed, and that’s what he’d done on this Saturday.
Mac still wore the suit he’d left the office in the day before. Left it for the last time. At least he wouldn’t have to tell Jean. He stared at the cold fireplace. He didn’t have to tell anybody. They had no close friends. His office colleagues would make what they wanted of the news on Monday.
The news.
The reality of dealing with the press came back to him. Oh yes, he would have to tell somebody. But tell them what? He’d resigned? He’d been fired?
He recalled what Buley had said about sending him the proposed press release for comment. That comment would be governed by his compromise agreement. And his payoff would be tied to that compromise agreement, the compromise in question being the one he’d make to sell his silence.
Mac stood and walked to the window to look down the valley at the twinkling lights in Lambourn. This career in racing, at the heart of it here in the Valley of the Racehorse, was what he’d worked for. This was his life. Had been his life…this, and Jean. He didn’t need money. The compromise agreement could lie unsigned for all he cared. Then, when the case against the three bent jockeys fell through he could gloat, unfettered by any contract. He could issue a big fat public I TOLD YOU SO! To Nic Buley.
But Mac knew he would not do that. In his world, no matter how primitive your feelings, regardless of your lust for revenge, it was not the done thing.
The stiff upper lip trumped personal wounds.
Dignity ruled.
Anyway, Jean’s absence relegated all else to the boundaries. The trouble was, Mac had to keep reminding himself of that.
Eddie and Mave sat through the dusk and into the night with lamps lighting the corners and logs crackling in the stove. It was warm outside, but thick walls kept the house cool. They needed the brightness of a fire, the lunging flames sparking optimism and fight. Eddie listened as Mave unravelled the years of her life. ‘I can’t recall not knowing Sonny. He was around our house all the time. I remember him jamming with dad. Dad’s Stratocaster didn’t go too well with Sonny’s accordion or his fiddle, but they always seemed to be smiling. And dad would finish a bottle of red and Sonny would try and talk him into playing some of the old Italian tunes he remembered, the ones his Dad taught him.
‘Sonny was born here. His mum and dad came over during the war and started a fish and chip shop in Glasgow. Dad went up there when he was still a teenager, trying to get gigs. Sonny was at one of the auditions. They went to a party that night and that was it. The Elderly Brothers, Dad used to call them. They got together and started touring the working men’s clubs in the north of England. They were getting so many gigs, they rented a house in Halifax and that was it. Until dad met mum.’ Mave smiled. ‘I remember mum telling me how hard he tried to persuade her to move into the digs in Halifax rather than them getting a place of their own. It took her a year to drag him away from Sonny. I wish, I wish, I wish he’d just have played with Sonny and no one else.’ She stared into the fire.
Mave’s father, Jack, was asked to fill in one night as lead guitarist for a band he’d never worked with before. Their equipment was faulty and he’d been electrocuted on stage and killed. He was thirty-five.
Mave told how Sonny had never missed a day visiting her and her mother in the months after her father’s death. As the years passed, they’d kept in touch with calls and letters and visits. Her mother died on what would have been her dad’s forty-seventh birthday. And Sonny returned once more to help Mave through.
Eddie knew how happy it had made Mave to be able to offer Sonny this job as her ‘special agent’. It had brought new life to him in his retirement. But she’d never foreseen this threat. Eddie realized he should have anticipated it.
They had made Sonny as anonymous as possible on the racecourse; dressed in drab clothes, and flat caps, spreading the bets around many bookmakers. No lumpy wagers with any single bookie. No conversations with them. Note each bookie and work through a cycle so that the same one wasn’t bet with again for at least a month.
But racetracks have no filtering system for villains. From rogues to royalty, this was the sport’s audience. Ninety-nine percent of racegoers were decent people, but skulking among them were spivs and pickpockets, thieves and junkies and sharpies seeking information and ‘contacts’. Men on the make. And women.
The call came at ten o’clock. Mave jumped to her feet, looking to her phone. But it was Eddie’s that rang. He recognized the city code as Birmingham. Mave sat still and unblinking as he answered it.
‘Eddie Malloy?’
‘That’s me.’
‘We’ve got your pal here.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘For now, he is.’
‘What do you want?’
‘The same information you give Sonny.’
‘Okay. We’ll work something out. We should meet.’
‘We will.’
‘When?’ Eddie asked.
‘Name it.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Okay. You’re riding at Market Rasen. I’ll see you there. Wait in your car after racing. Leave the doors open. I’ll get in the back.’
‘You sure?’ Eddie said.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Well, if I’m going to start giving you tips and you’re going to bet them, are you happy for all the faces to see us together?’
‘Fair point. Where, then?’
‘You know the golf course close to the track?’
‘Yes.’
‘A wood borders the eastern side of it. A decent road runs through the wood. Drive down off the main drag and take a right at the fork. You’ll be able to see one of the tees on the golf course. I’ll meet you there half an hour after the last.’
‘No cops. No company. Just you and me. I’ve got some very sharp pictures of you on five different occasions taking lumps of cash from Sonny. I’ve got video too. You won’t want to be joining your mates at the Old Bailey.’
‘Can I speak to Sonny?’
‘I’m in a pay phone. No room for two. Sonny’s okay. He’s being looked after.’
‘I’m glad to hear that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Mave waved frantically and mimicked an injection in her arm. Eddie said to the caller, ‘Does Sonny have enough medication?’
‘Yes. He’s fine. Sonny’s an asset. We’ll look after him.’
‘He’s not a fucking asset. He’s my friend, and if anything happens to him, you can put your photos on a poster in Trafalgar Square for all I care. Then you’d better leave the country.’